


No more than a stone in a pasture full of stones

by Annakovsky



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-02
Updated: 2006-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-03 18:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annakovsky/pseuds/Annakovsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Fault. That's probably all you need to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No more than a stone in a pasture full of stones

_If you couldn't be a sex crimes detective, what would you be?_

**

When she leaves Cragen's office, he calls Elliot in, and Elliot gives her a sidelong look before he goes. She sits at her desk, too tired to go home, but then she realizes she'd rather not be there when Elliot comes out again and she gets her things together.

A new partner. She wants. Her hands are starting to shake as she puts on her coat.

She's waiting for the elevators when Elliot catches up with her. "Liv," he says, from behind her. She turns and he's standing a few feet away, and his face. She can hardly look at it. She focuses on the knot of his tie. "Olivia," he says.

"That's what you wanted, right?" she says, and the elevator dings. She's still shaking when she gets on, jams at the L button, and as the doors slide shut she finally meets his eyes. She feels scraped raw all over, and he looks it.

**

She keeps her mother's file in the back of her closet. She hasn't looked at it in a long time, but tonight she does, she doesn't know why. When the tape of her mother's interview by the police gets to the end, she rewinds and replays it, even though she knows it by heart. "You gotta speak up, honey," the cop on the tape says. Her mother's crying. Elliot calls but she doesn't answer - instead she turns her cell phone off and flips through the file again, like it'll explain everything about how this happened, how she got here. She probably shouldn't have gone into SVU in the first place. It's a mess, it's all a mess.

**

They transfer her over to Homicide. Her new partner's Eddie Schillizzi - 50-something with a gut, loud. The first time she sees him he's eating a donut and regaling the squad room with his kid's latest basketball game. By the second day she's realized that he plays the loud dumb cop to cover the fact that he notices everything, but that first time she sees him, he's nothing like Elliot. Which is a relief.

He wipes powdered sugar off his hand before he shakes hers, and says, "Hey, hero cop." She and Elliot were on the front page of the Post, carrying the little girl out of the warehouse. In the picture, Rebecca has her face buried in Elliot's neck; he's frowning and looking lost. Olivia's a little behind him, to the left, watching his back. In the picture she doesn't look as rattled as she remembers being.

"Right," she says to Schillizzi, smiling like it's funny. He introduces her around, lets her settle in. She starts to put out a picture of her mother, but it looks out of place on the grey metal desks they've got in Homicide, so she puts it in a drawer instead.

"So what brings you to Homicide?" Schillizzi says, leaning back in his chair, sizing her up.

She shrugs and arranges her pens. "This and that."

**

After her first day in Homicide, she has her hair cut short. New department, new partner, new everything, and she can't be bothered with long hair.

**

She has nightmares, but when she wakes up, all she can remember of them is the feeling of being deeply unsettled. That, and the look on Elliot's face. It's four in the morning, and her apartment is shades of black and grey, and when she can't fall back asleep, she pads into the kitchen without turning on the lights. Drinks a glass of lukewarm water slowly, standing by the sink, the floor cold on her bare feet, wanting something she can't put into words.

**

When she walks into the squad room, Martin says, "Hey, where's your partner?" and she wonders how he knows Elliot before she realizes he means Schillizzi.

Schillizzi's in the break room. She doesn't know where Elliot is anymore.

**

She's killed every plant she's ever had, but her third day in Homicide the grocery store is selling hanging baskets of petunias and she buys a pot full of yellow and blue ones on a whim, hangs them in her window. It's going on spring, and now that she's in Homicide, she'll be home more. There's less motivation to stay late on the job.

Not because of Elliot. Because of her mother, and justice for sex crimes, and everything driving her in SVU. Besides, at night Schillizzi goes home to his wife and kids, doesn't make excuses to stay. Unlike some people.

When she tries to think about that last conversation in the hospital, her mind slides away, like it hurts too much to touch. They couldn't go on like that. She had to ask for a change. Elliot wouldn't have.

The fifth day after her transfer, Schillizzi catches a kid clubbed to death with a baseball bat. They canvass half the upper east side, and by the time she finally heads home, she's exhausted. Walks in her door and kicks off her shoes before she collapses onto the couch in the dark apartment and closes her eyes. But when her phone rings, she knows who it is before she even looks at the caller ID. He would've known when her shift finished, known how long for her commute. That's how they are.

She wants to let it go to voicemail, but by the fourth ring she can't handle it, and answers without knowing what she's going to say. At first she doesn't say anything. Finally, "Elliot."

"Hey." He sounds tired. She wonders if he's still sleeping in the crib.

She closes her eyes and presses the phone to her ear and listens to him breathe, and feels a little better. When he doesn't say anything, she asks, "How're things?"

He snorts a little, a mix of amusement and disgust. "I worked a case with Munch."

She smiles. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"And you both lived through it."

"Munch is a lucky man," Elliot says. "How's Homicide?"

She shrugs, keeps it light. "Tame. I haven't seen any kiddie porn or sent any fluids to the lab in days."

"Disappointing."

"Tell me about it."

He pauses. Then, "And the new partner?"

She weighs it, doesn't know quite what to say. She thinks about Schillizzi, who is a good cop, a decent cop, but she has to pay attention to catch his moods, to know if he's going left or right, what line he's going to take in the box. It's not the same. In the end, she says, "Fine, I guess. Different."

"Yeah," he says. "Well."

She's used to Elliot's silences, but this one she doesn't recognize, and after they finally hang up she can't sleep for hours, thinking. She misses him but doesn't at the same time, and he chose her over the victim, and so did she, for whatever that's worth, for whatever that means, and everything's different but maybe it's just the same, only more obvious, and. She's wide awake. It'd probably be easier if she just didn't talk to him again, but that's hard to imagine.

**

She keeps not sleeping. They're making her go to the company shrink, but it never helps, and when she sleeps she still dreams. That little boy Ryan in a pool of his own blood, and when she wakes up the cut on her neck is aching. It's scabbed over and healing, and the bruises from where she hit the ground have turned an appealing shade of green, and they buried Ryan on a cloudy day in a small oak coffin.

She gives up on sleep, drives down to the house to do paperwork or something, anything. It's a quiet night, no one much around, but after awhile the fluorescent lights in the squad room start to give her a headache. Maybe it's just the memory of exhaustion and late nights coming back at her, memories of long cases and never going home.

She wants to check something down in evidence from an old file, but she's tired enough that on her way down, her body accidentally takes her right into SVU. Muscle memory will do that.

It all looks the same, but it's only been a week, so. Her desk is still empty and cleared off. Three in the morning, but Elliot's coat is hanging on the coat rack.

He's in the crib, sleeping on his side, turned towards the door. His t-shirt is old and gray, and his eyes are closed, but he looks sad even asleep. She shuts the door behind her and sits on a bottom bunk and watches him. Those beds in the crib aren't comfortable, it's not good for him to keep sleeping here.

He shifts in his sleep and his eyes blink open, and when he sees her, he smiles.

She rests her elbows on her knees. "Wouldn't you sleep better at home?"

He tries to tamp down the smile, but just ends up looking like a little kid with a secret. "Probably."

She shakes her head at him, and notes the dark circles under his eyes and worries.

He sits up and rubs at his face. "You not sleeping?" he says.

"I'm okay," she says, and he looks at her.

They are edging around something, here. They've been edging for awhile.

"Well," he says, and his voice is quieter. "Look. If you need anything."

"Yeah," she says. "I know."

He presses the flat of his hand against his knee and then looks right at her. "Liv," he says. "I…."

Something about the way he looks at her - she can't catch her breath. He stops.

"What?" she says finally.

"Nothing," he says, and looks away. "Forget it."

Her shoulders start to ache, and she realizes that she's tense all over. "Go back to sleep," she says, and tries to relax. "Sorry I woke you." He shakes his head like it doesn't matter, looking at the bunk beds in front of him, and she thinks about touching his shoulder but doesn't. Closes the door softly behind her. He never asked what she was doing there. Good thing, since she doesn't know.

**

She's doing paperwork when Schillizzi comes in with coffee and the paper. He keeps putting sugar in her coffee, but otherwise, he's working out okay. She could do worse.

He drops the paper on her desk. "Bet you're glad you're not in SVU right now," he says. She checks the headline. Some pedophile's kidnapped a 10-year-old girl. They've released a composite sketch and set up a tip line, which is never a good sign. Everyone's cranky when they have to answer a thousand phone calls with leads that don't pan out. "I hear they've been working 48 hours straight," Schillizzi says.

"Yeah," she says vaguely, reading the first paragraph of the article. "I don't miss that." But she does, sort of, and she thinks about Munch and Fin and Cragen and everybody working together, and that adrenalized determination, and riding the edge of panic, and wants to be there.

The phone rings and she takes the call. Wife shot her husband, confesses ten minutes after they arrive. Then it's just paperwork. When she goes home, she flips on the local news and watches Cragen give a press conference. It feels strange from this angle.

**

Her flowers are already dying - Homicide's not that different from SVU in a lot of ways, and it looks like she's not that different either. She waters them but they don't perk up.

**

She goes to the break room in the afternoon to get more coffee, and Martin's got the news on the little TV. She recognizes Fin's back putting someone in handcuffs into a car and stops short, automatically looks for Elliot. "What happened?" she asks.

"They caught that pedophile," Martin says. "Found the little girl, too."

"Oh," Olivia says. "Good."

The camera pans over the crowd and she sees Elliot. He has that grim, satisfied expression he always gets. Looks exhausted.

Martin's saying something. "What?" Olivia asks.

"I said, that used to be your unit, right?" Martin's giving her a strange look.

"Oh," she says. "Yeah."

She goes back to her desk and hits 1 on her speed dial, but hangs up before Elliot can answer.

**

They'll be interrogating the perp and booking him and talking to the little girl and gathering the evidence and Casey will be stalking around talking about the case, and Olivia's so distracted thinking about it she's only half-concentrating on the drug murder they're investigating. Schillizzi's theorizing and when she has to ask him to repeat himself for the second time, he gives her a look.

"You okay?"

"Hmm?" she says. "Yeah. Yes. Why?"

He's looking at her like he wants to pat her on the head and tuck her in. "Go home, Benson." She thinks about protesting, but goes home instead. It's quitting time anyway.

Her apartment's kind of messy, and the TV is still reporting on the pedophile case, and she can't settle to anything. She tries to pay some bills. It's started to rain.

She's been home an hour before there's a knock on her door. When she opens it, Elliot's standing there with his hands in his coat pockets and rain on his shoulders, and he looks like it's been a long day. From the drop in her stomach, she guesses she's been waiting to see him. It's about time.

"Long day?" she says.

"Something like that," he says. He doesn't move. They look at each other across the threshold.

"I saw you on the news," she starts to say, but halfway through he steps forward and she falters. He moves so he's standing so close he could kiss her, but he doesn't. Doesn't touch her either. He smells like rain, and he's just standing there, and she doesn't move away. Everything's taken on a hazy slow air of inevitability.

"Enough," he says, really quietly, and his forehead is almost touching hers.

She's really conscious of her breathing. "Yeah," she says, and rests her hand on his forearm, his coat damp against her fingers. He sighs and closes his eyes so his eyelashes show against his cheeks, and she thinks of him closing his eyes with Guitano's gun to his head, ready for her to shoot. It's like they're back in that warehouse and Guitano's yelling but she can barely hear him.

"Elliot," she says, and he finally leans in, his hands still fisted in his coat pockets. When he kisses her, it's just the corner of her mouth at first, quiet, tentative, and she closes her eyes and feels like crying.

"Enough," he says again, and kisses her harder in the open doorway, his hand on the frame. Elliot kisses the way she thought he would. He's been on a case for days and he hasn't shaved so his stubble scrapes her, and he seems so tired. When she kisses him back he moves his hands to her waist and flexes them, and when she slides her arms around his neck the rain soaks through her sleeves, and maybe it is enough. Maybe it is.


End file.
